Courses Part 3: Development

A class we also commonly decided to attend is Developmental Psycho-pathology which is designed to review a wide range of disorders of childhood and adolescence. It also covers possible etiologies from a number of theoretical perspectives and by the end of this course, students should be able to describe and differentiate the major disorders of childhood and adolescence, have knowledge of major etiologic theories pertinent to those disorders, and be able to apply that knowledge to clinical samples. We are all very glad to have the possibility to attend this class as a wide array of different deviations from the normal developmental course of children is discussed and as the tools of American childhood and early intervention are constituted for every single disorder (e.g. Autism, ADHD, Conduct Disorder, Childhood Depression and Childhood Schizophrenia). Therefore we get an overview of many different childhood problems and possible interventions.

Another course we attend at the UNC Department of Psychology is The Study of Adolescent Issues and Development. It provides an analysis of psychological factors related to transitional development from childhood to adolescence and adulthood including the emergence of the teenage years, puberty, reproduction, identity and self-concept issues and youth adulthood. In the context of this course we acquire knowledge within theoretical perspectives that address adolescence including biological theories, organismic theories, learning theories, sociological theories, historical and anthropological approaches. Moreover, every session a group of students presents a current newspaper article on the topic. As both students and instructor often share their personal experiences from childhood and adolescence, this course enables us to delve into the American society and the everyday life of youths in the US.

Besides that we attend a course that is intended to make us familiar with the perspective of DSM-IV-TR and, even more important to us, with the forthcoming DSM-V, classical notions of psychopathology, and alternative perspectives (e.g., historical, economic, professional) on unusual behavior. We read important papers for the major psychological disorders in order to develop our own critical perspective on the field of abnormal psychology. The aim of the class is to familiarize us with certain important disorders in enough depth so that we are able to make an informed analysis and critique. This course helps us a lot to compare the German discipline related point of view with the American perspective and by this is enriching our ways of thinking and recessing our diagnostic abilities. We hope that this class will help us to correctly identify and distinguish different mental disabilities that might occur in children, adolescents and adults.

Of great value to us is also an extracurricular proseminar arranged by the Center for Developmental Science.  The consortium series is titled Exploring the relation between parent psychopathology and the development of children’s emotion regulation. The focus of this series is to explore whether and how parental psychopathology is associated with children’s emotion regulation. The course started with an overview of the development of emotion regulation in early and middle childhood. A range of forms of parent psychopathology (e.g., alcoholism, depression, borderline personality disorder) and their impact on children’s emotion regulation are discussed.  In examining the questions of causes and correlates, the course`s goal is to consider mechanisms of vulnerability and protection that move across a range of levels of analysis, particularly including genetics and biology, family and individual characteristics, and even larger societal contexts, such as neighborhoods and poverty. The very up to date research results presented there are of inestimable value to us, as they set the basis for developing new specific intervention strategies and practices.

To sum it all up we are very happy and grateful for this experience and we really feel that we learn lot things that are of irreplaceable value to us.